Say what you want about Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, but one thing is certain: He rarely mutes the mic.
The veteran tech leader is perhaps the most vocal advocate for AI, championing it as the most crucial piece of the puzzle for enterprise-related growth.
Also, it’s important to acknowledge the massive AI empire he’s built.
Salesforce has gone from $5.37 billion in annual sales in 2015 to nearly $38 billion in 2025. Over the same stretch, its market cap has skyrocketed from $51 billion to $235 billion, an incredible wealth-compounding that shows no signs of slowing down.
Now, Benioff’s pitch is Agentforce.
It’s not just a single product, but also a mesh of AI-powered agents that are integrated across Salesforce’s cloud suite, from Sales to Slack. The goal is to reduce silos, promote swifter action, and take more effective decisions at scale.
However, these moves aren’t just about deepening CRM.
In a surprise turn, Benioff is making a calculated move into a software category that’s long been synonymous with ServiceNow (NOW), a nearly $200 billion enterprise software titan.
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Salesforce opens a new front in ITSM, challenging ServiceNow
Salesforce wasn’t just pitching AI at Dreamforce; in fact, CEO Marc Benioff sketched a lane that runs straight through ServiceNow’s turf.
In a sit-down interview with Jim Cramer in San Francisco on October 14, 2025, during the Dreamforce 2025 conference, Benioff revealed that Salesforce is moving into IT service management (ITSM) with its Agentforce agentic IT service. He considers this more of a platform play, leveraging the company’s existing footprint.
Benioff also spoke of a major competitor in ServiceNow:
ServiceNow is a great company. They have 8,000 or 9,000 customers. You know that. We have a million customers with Slack, 150,000 on core Salesforce services. All of them want this kind of capability. They want IT service. They want field service. They want call centers.
That said, Benioff’s entire pitch rests on distribution and data gravity.
The goal is to essentially put AI agents right inside the tools in which people already live, letting Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Slack, Tableau, and Data Cloud do all the heavy lifting.
In his words, what was a single product last year has become a full-fledged platform, with “tens of thousands” of deployments already live.
Salesforce eyes $30 billion ITSM market
According to Grand View Research, the ITSM space is massive, representing roughly $13.5 billion in 2024, and remains on track to hit about $29.9 billion by 2030, growing at a 14.4% CAGR.
Another dataset pegs the market’s size in 2025 at $12.8 billion, potentially surging to $27.8 billion by 2030 (16.7% CAGR), underscoring the strength of the secular tailwind.
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ServiceNow dominates this field, commanding more than 44% of ITSM share as of 2024 and generating $12.1 billion in trailing 12-month sales. Its Q2 2025 numbers came in strong as well, where it posted $3.22 billion in sales, up 22.5% year over year.
Now imagine Salesforce stepping in.
Even if the tech giant took a 1% slice of today’s ITSM pie, it could rake in roughly $130 million to $140 million in annualized sales. A 2% share doubles that to around $260 million to $280 million, and with the market swelling toward 2030, those slices expand proportionally.
Benioff calls Agentforce spin-off chatter “complete lunacy“
Marc Benioff was quick to dismiss Wall Street’s latest fantasy.
When Jim Cramer suggested Salesforce could potentially beef up its valuation by spinning off its AI arm, the CEO snapped back:
Absurd? It’s complete lunacy. People don’t understand that Agentforce is part and parcel of Salesforce. It is the core of every product we make now. It is the platform.
That pushback effectively set the tone for Dreamforce 2025, where Benioff’s message was crystal clear that Agentforce isn’t an add-on, but more of a connective tissue binding Salesforce’s clouds.
Salesforce can inject autonomous AI agents across Sales, Service, Slack, and Tableau to efficiently streamline workflows, resolve tickets, and expand into adjacent markets, such as IT services and internal operations.
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Moreover, Benioff didn’t just talk about the platform; he showed results.
At FedEx, COO Richard Smith “has been able to make hundreds of millions of dollars” using Salesforce’s potent Data Cloud in identifying and converting domestic shippers into global clients. At Dell, Agentforce is powering an incredible supply chain platform with 20,000 suppliers already onboard.
The financials back the pivot.
Data Cloud and AI ARR topped $1.2 billion in Q2, up an enormous 120% year over year. Additionally, north of 12,500 Agentforce-related deals have closed since its launch, with 6,000 paid, and 40% of Q2 bookings coming from expansions within existing accounts.
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